I simply just change too much even whilst sitting still. I rationalize anything I want, or so I am told. I have a bird’s eye view on life so it’s very difficult for me to make decisions.
I create landscapes of discomfort sitting on my pretty little comfortable chair.
I’m simply afraid to enter new knowledge, although if you’d ask me I’d say that’s my main thing in life so far.
I take fashionable risks. I seem to only come out of the comfort zone by building highly intimate and meaningful relationships to be carried until death with highly conflicting and beautiful people.
But life keeps on paralyzing me. I do not know where I stand in this world, and I take pride in the fact only in private.
I talk about things everyone would want to hear but things no one has time or energy for, so it seems.
I have to live as if I know it all, and I have to write as if I forgot it all.
I need to not want it if I don’t want it. Sometimes I need to say the need-not say it.
I persistently break apart what arrives as a whole into my hands. I put together everything that someone else broke into pieces beforehand.
I know that you know. But I often don’t know that you know what I know.
I celebrate then I hit it on the head.
Where you call for boundaries I place border officers to bribe one day.
We look at a wall together and I say it’s at most a frozen glass or a door with a loosened lock.
I know how well of a poet you are and you know how well of a poet I am. You give me the description for trust.
Don’t worry I can’t pass through unless you ask for me to. But I sneak in the answers already before everything.
I walk around with a hammer but I don’t use it. I have an hourly rate.
I walk around with a first aid kit and no medical degree.
I dream about you without your consent.
I have a big ass gum eraser in my hands. You better run away.
The art of convincing is above all our craft. You turn your head looking the other way. In turn I cry and then I see the stone walls built around me. We are a secret collective. We secretly break boundaries. We secretly give away everything we have in our hands. We secretly ask for you to do the same. One day you secretly report on us. The authorities secretly run an operation to our headquarters. We secretly get taken to the secret location, our hands are cuffed, our necks are bent, because we secretly carry a smile on our faces.
Boundary Issues by John Ashbery Here in life, they would understand. How could it be otherwise? We had groped too, unwise, till the margin began to give way, at which point all was sullen, or lost, or both. Now it was time, and there was nothing for it. We had a good meal, I and my friend, slurping from the milk pail, grabbing at newer vegetables. Yet life was a desert. Come home, in good faith. You can still decide to. But it wanted warmth. Otherwise ruse and subtlety would become impossible in the few years or hours left to us. “Yes, but . . .” The iconic beggars shuffled off too. I told you, once a breach emerges it will become a chasm before anyone’s had a chance to waver. A dispute on the far side of town erupts into a war in no time at all, and ends as abruptly. The tendency to heal sweeps all before it, into the arroyo, the mine shaft, into whatever pocket you were contemplating. And the truly lost make up for it. It’s always us that has to pay. I have a suggestion to make: draw the sting out as probingly as you please. Plaster the windows over with wood pulp against the noon gloom proposing its enigmas, its elixirs. Banish truth-telling. That’s the whole point, as I understand it. Each new investigation rebuilds the urgency, like a sand rampart. And further reflection undermines it, causing its eventual collapse. We could see all that from a distance, as on a curving abacus, in urgency mode from day one, but by then dispatches hardly mattered. It was camaraderie, or something like it, that did, poring over us like we were papyri, hoping to find one correct attitude sketched on the gaslit air, night’s friendly takeover.
I am going back to reading my Clarice Lispector now, hoping the next moment to be a new one, always, and impregnated.